Necassary Tools

I am considering building new cabinets for my house. I was previewing some cabinet building books at my local Menards store. To my suprise none of them recommended that I would need large Drum or Belt Sander, Planner, or a Shaper. I would like to build a very high quility constructed cabinet. Raised panel doors, dovetail drawers solid wood sides etc.

Does anyone think this can be accomplished with a powerful quility Router, hand operated belt sander, and some planes.

That said, it’s an ambitious project and you will want to build the modules in the shop so as not to disrupt your life. If your kitchen is anything like mine, you are talking 40 doors and 25 drawers. That’s a lot of freaking work, especially if you plan on doing dovetails. I’d either use box joints with a jig or purchase something like Blum soft-close drawer slides where you just supply the back, bottom, and front panels.

You’ll want a big router to spin the big panel raising bits, but you can do it with a regular router (like a 2.25 to 2.5 hp) if you take very small passes….which you’ll want to do anyway. You can also use vertical panel raising bits, where you pass the panel through on edge…these are easier to spin in regular routers.

Mr. Cosmicsniper: I was accually thinking of doing my whole house that I built 15 years ago with modistly built cabinets. I just counted, and I have 37 raised panel cabinet doors, and a cobination of 52 raised panel or flat face drawer fronts. Any specific tool recommendations for a fairly big task.

Wow. Then I’d look into doing the dovetails mechanically, with either a commercial jig (like Akeda or Leigh) or a positioning fence (I use an Incra LS). This will help to mass-produce the drawer boxes.

I’d also want a planer and jointer so that you don’t have to work with finished dimension stock from a big box store…too expensive.

If your existing cabinets are also raised panels, I would consider reusing them. I did that for my kitchen, reprofiling the panels and using wider rails and stiles to compensate….which I wanted anyway. If you don’t have that, you will need a way to joint those boards to create the panels. A finely tuned table saw with glueline rip blade will do in lieu of a jointer.

Look at what you’d consider a reasonable timeframe. That is a nice size project, especially if you’ve never built cabinets. If you have no time frame and someplace to work that many at one time, it will be a fun project and very rewarding.

All my current drawers are dovetail boxes with just a 1/4 bottom. As I mentioned earlier, they have decenent undermounted slides. The style of the cabinet fronts is a full overlay with a matching frame underneath. The drawers have no matching frame, they just close on the egdes of the plywood sides that are covered with a cheesy strip of melomine that no longer matches the aged natural cherry satin finish. I am not opposed to keeping all these solid cherry fronts, and drawer boxes. The real disapointment is the flush veneer exposed sides, that basically have no character and in some cases look weathered where the natural sun light has faded them. The overall design and theme is very modest with a beautifully warm amber color. I am in a location where I cannot over improve the property. I was thinking how I could justify buying a few thousand dollars of tools. I do have a pole building where I could take my time building this project.

You’re looking at frameless I think. You need a way to makeplywood edges straight and square enough for edgebanding.Simply ripping cabinet sides on a table saw often resultsin scooped edges that aren’t straight enough. Face frames make this a non-issue, but if you want to build frameless it is something you need to address. A tracksaw is a good way to go about straight-lining cabinet edges for banding.

I was mistaken, my cabinet doors and drawers are all framless, with this no longer matching cheep melomine glued to the edges of all the plywood sides. I read in a book this weekend that cabinets with a flush frame around all the doors and drawers was represented as being the highest end quility and workmanship. Would you agree.

I don’t how I can salvage my excisting doors and drawers with all the change in color from 13 years of sun exposure.

I would recommend a Festool saw and guide system to make good cabinets and one only has a small space.You can get by with a 6” jointer, a decent planer ( Dewalt 435 ), Bosch table saw, a ROS sander ( Festool ), and a good miter saw ( Dewalt 12” sliding type ), and router. These would be the basic tools to have. Here are some photos of a set of cabinets I recently built using only these tools because I was at a remote location and not near the shop.